NEW YORK (AP) — Zacarias Moussaoui, who was charged this week with plotting the Sept. 11 attacks with Osama bin Laden, will stand trial in Virginia, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

Moussaoui was handcuffed and shackled as he walked into U.S. District Court in Manhattan for the brief hearing before Judge Barbara S. Jones. She ordered him sent to Alexandria, Va., and denied him bail.

"There are no conditions or combination of conditions that would safeguard the community," she said.

Moussaoui nodded in the direction of the judge when she asked him if he understood his rights. He did not enter a plea.

An indictment returned Tuesday by a grand jury in Virginia alleges Moussaoui worked with 23 unindicted co-conspirators to murder thousands of people, even though he spent the month before the hijackings in a Minnesota prison for immigration violations.

Moussaoui is charged with six conspiracy charges, four of them carrying the death penalty. Attorney General John Ashcroft called him an "active participant" with the 19 hijackers who crashed four jetliners in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyer, Donald DuBoulay, challenged the government on several issues, including its identification of his client, but the judge quickly ruled that nothing said would interrupt the transfer.

Outside court, DuBoulay said he was going to "use every legal strategy we have to contest this matter."

"I'm not going to roll over for them when they are trying to kill a man," he said.

Asked if his client feared the potential death penalty, the lawyer said, "He's not scared."

The hearing, a procedural matter, was Moussaoui's first public appearance since the terrorist attacks. The 33-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent was detained Aug. 17 after raising suspicions while seeking flight training in Minnesota.

The indictment charges Moussaoui "with conspiring with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida to murder thousands of innocent people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11." The attacks left some 3,200 people dead or missing.

The 30-page indictment says Moussaoui's activities mirrored those of the hijackers, from attending flight school to buying flight deck instructional videos.

Moussaoui trained in Afghanistan in April 1998 at a camp run by bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network, the indictment charged. Around the same time, Mohamed Atta, suspected ringleader of the hijackers, and two other hijackers formed an al-Qaida terrorist cell in Germany.

Last year, Atta and the other hijackers traveled to the United States. In July, Atta visited the same flight school in Norman, Okla., where Moussaoui would eventually enroll.

Moussaoui has been held in New York since September as a material witness — someone with possibly important information — in the investigation of the terrorist attacks.

He faces arraignment Jan. 2 on six charges of conspiracy: terrorism, aircraft piracy, destruction of aircraft, use of weapons of mass destruction, murder and destruction of property.

The Bush administration opted against using a military tribunal to try Moussaoui in secret. He instead faces trial in a courthouse near where one of the jets crashed into the Pentagon.